he order of the day, each girl in turn relating
the doings of the holidays, and having her adventures capped by the next
speaker. Thomasina, however, showed a sleepy tendency, and kept dozing
off for a short nap, and then nodding her head so violently that she
awoke with a gasp of surprise. In one of these intervals she met
Dorothy's eyes fixed upon her with a wondering scrutiny, which seemed to
afford her acute satisfaction.

"Ah!" she cried, sitting up and looking in a trice quite spry and wide-
awake. "I know what you are doing! You are admiring me, and wondering
what work of nature I most resemble. I can see it in your face. And
you came to the conclusion that it was a codfish! No quibbles, please!
Tell me the truth. That was just exactly it, wasn't it?"

"_No_!" cried Dorothy emphatically, but the emphasis expressed rather
contrition for a lost opportunity than for a wrongful suspicion. "No, I
did not!" it seemed to say, "How stupid not to have thought of it.
You--really--are--extraordinarily like!"

"Humph!" said Thomasina. "Then you are the exception, that's all. All
the new-comers say so, and therein they err. It's not a cod at all,
it's a pike. I am the staring image of a pike!"

She screwed up her little eyes as she spoke, and pulled back her chin in
a wonderful, fish-like grin which awoke a shriek of merriment from the
beholders. Even Rhoda laughed with the rest, and reflected that if one
were born ugly it was a capital plan to accept the fact, and make it a
joke rather than a reproach. Thomasina was the plainest girl she had
ever seen, yet she exercised a wonderful attraction, and was infinitely
more popular among her companions than Irene Grey, with her big eyes and
well-cut features.

"Next time you catch a pike just look at it and see if I'm not right,"
continued Tom easily. "But perhaps you don't fish. I'm a great angler
myself. That's the way I spend most of my time during the holidays."

"I don't like fishing, its so wormy," said Irene, with a shudder. "I
like lolling about and feeling that there's nothing to do, and no
wretched bells jangling every half-hour to send you off to a fresh
class. `Nerve rest,' that's what _I_ need in my holidays, and I take
good care that I get it."

"I don't want rest. I want to fly round the whole day and do nice
things," said a bright-eyed girl in a wonderful plaid dress ornamented
with countless buttons--"lunches, and teas, and dinners, and